Tragedy of Noblest Intellect in Hamlet

Emerson’s essay Intellect provides some very deep illuminations of intellect, “The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that
mass of mental and moral phenomena, which we do not make objects of
voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute
the circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear,
and hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of
melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of
destiny. We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear.” He calls intellect constructive ‘Genius’. What is intriguing to me is that the noblest intellect of Hamlet, capable in a single monologue of piercing the the deepest interior depth of man of his motives and his emotions, his extremely delicate and noble act of devising truth-to-power through art enough without losing royal authority by being seconded by the scholar Horatio regards the murder of his father when Claudius reveals his guilt by standing and leaving the performance of Hamlet’s play, and yet the play ends in the tragic death of the entire royal family and with a soldier’s burial for Hamlet, transforming his quandary regarding death into a prophetic reality. In his sublime intellect Hamlet is perhaps second to none of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes with the stark contrast with the romantic hero Othello forming a counterpoint in passionate thoughtless actor. Yet, Emersonian Intellect is decimated in the play for its inability through Hamlet in bringing justice to the situation that obsesses Hamlet of the illegitimacy of the King Claudius who murdered the king. No fool Hamlet and gifted beyond doubts and yet the play unfolds to shatter the intellect’s ability to produce a solution beyond a temporary and ultimately tragic one. It is too simple to consider the sequence of events as a comedy or tragedy of errors although willed intellect plays here the role of noblest intellect as opposed to the malicious evil intellect of Iago of Othello. Often there is a temptation in tragedy to interpret simply a comedy of errors but the tragic is sublime and is not possible to capture by a ‘clusterfuck’ of bad decisions and in the case of Hamlet, the decisions are far from bad or ignoble. It is likewise problematic to simply pin on obscenity of destiny for otherwise Hamlet would not be ultra-aware in his main soliloquy of ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. The tragedy of the play brings the awareness of higher order than all that is mentioned in Hamlet’s soliloquy in order to differentiate itself from these explicitly. Of course, action is key to the tragedy for Hamlet does act and action is not simply decided but done by extreme care: the decision to truth-to-power through art could be one of the most sublime and noble decisions that could be found in a gory tale where the brooding darkness obsesses the prince. Emerson’s essay Intellect is perhaps only exemplified partly in Hamlet’s own thought for he shows himself at ease in the analyses of not only the abstract but the concrete events and able to mull over ramifications not only for a cheap effectiveness but with grand nobility. The house of cards of delicate reason of the melancholy prince is to no avail and the play ends in tragedy and death for the entire royal family. Any temptation to make a meek identification of the tragedy with a generic impotence of the will and reason to implacable fate is erroneous for Hamlet knows enough about the acts of will as Emerson expounds on his essay: As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of
destiny. We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. Hamlet’s capacity to understand truth separated by the intellect even in this Emersonian sense is clear and yet it is ultimately to no avail and this is the sublime in tragedy for it is not meekness of will that is the fundamental issue, for Hamlet without cowardice does make decisive acts (such as the brilliance of his play before King Claudius and Queen Gertrude which is no mean feat and successful on the face of it). Here we see in Shakespearean genius the limits of the house of cards of Reason and Intellect which must pay homage to greater forces that cannot be reached whose identities lie hidden, for unlike ancient Greek tragedy where there are colourful deities whose actions animate the higher order of reality, Shakespeare’s Hamlet cannot succeed in an age where the gods do not have any more than comic representations leaving the question of interpretation of nature of the tragic in greater mystery.